
Efficient Vaccination in Volatile Pandemic
Speaker: Jiangzhuo Chen, University of Virginia
Abstract: Vaccines have begun to play an important role in mitigating the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. While vaccines are being administered, more infectious new variants continue to spread in the population and may soon become dominant; people start reducing social distancing and gradually return to their normal activities. These changes will potentially increase the effective reproduction number R of the disease. On the other hand, it takes time to vaccinate all those who are willing and for some places in the world, it's challenging to obtain a sufficient vaccine supply for all people. Due to the fast-changing nature of the disease and human behavior, we need more efficient vaccination strategies to achieve optimal results in terms of reducing infections/hospitalizations/deaths. In this work, we take into account the volatile nature of the COVID-19 pandemic, including new variants, relaxation of the non-pharmaceutical interventions, and vaccine hesitancy, and use an agent-based model to study how speedup of vaccination can help to nullify the impact of these factors. We compare different strategies of the COVID-19 vaccine allocation to individuals, including age-based schemes and schemes based on structural properties of the underlying social contact network.
Bio: Jiangzhuo Chen is a research associate professor in the Network Systems Science and Advanced Computing division. Chen received his BA in Economics from Nanjing University, MA. in Economics from Boston College, and PhD in Computer Science from Northeastern University. Dr. Chen’s dissertation explores confluent flows. Chen was a post-doctoral researcher and a senior research associate in the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory at the Biocomplexity Institute of Virginia Tech. Chen’s work has been published in journals and peer-reviewed conferences, such as the Journal of the ACM, ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation, PLOS ONE, Computational Economics, JEBO, STOC, ICS.